Top Stories

Review: Kedr Livanskiy expands the breadth and beauty of her techno productions on Your Need

Your Need is Kedr Livanskiy’s follow-up to Ariadne, and with the aid of co-producer Flaty, it instils some of that on-stage luminescence into her recorded work. No longer pursuing anything as rudimentary as minimal techno, the Moscow producer is idiosyncratic.

Seeing Kedr Livanskiy live for the first time is jarring, a kinetic circus and luminescent melodrama that belies the lo-fi, sun-stroked mutedness of her January Sun EP and 2017 debut album Ariadne. Listening to those releases’ wheezing drum machines and elegiac synths, not to mention her infinitely echoing vocals, evokes an eerily calming solitude, as if contentedly lost in a long-abandoned power station. Seeing these same songs performed live, brought to life as it were, is to have them illuminated, populating the power station with throngs of ravers and shards of spotlight.

Your Need is Livanskiy’s follow-up to Ariadne, and with the aid of co-producer Flaty, it instils some of that on-stage luminescence into her recorded work. No longer pursuing anything as rudimentary as minimal techno, the Moscow producer is idiosyncratic. At times, the mangled, shrieking synths and hyperactive breakbeats on ‘Kiska’ and the title track conjure The Knife taking on footwork. Meanwhile ‘Lugovoy (November Dub)’ and its successor ‘Bounce 2’ stretch dub in entirely different directions, the former a mellow slow-burn, perforated with husky vocal chants, the latter a deceptively simple stormer, its core beat simple-minded and ruthlessly efficient. ‘Sky Houses’ is a pleasantly languid helping of deep house.

‘LED’ is the record’s closest approximation to pop, vaunting a Chromatics-redolent synth underpinned by a straightforwardly satisfying drumbeat, rendered stunningly by Livanskiy’s overlapping vocal tones. It’s really quite beautiful. Then there’s the closing rave ecstasy of ‘Ivan Kupala’, with rambunctious snares and mellifluous synthlines – it can’t be overstated how pretty this album is – accelerating towards a climax which never comes, pregnant with unbridled, air-punching, mate-hugging joy. And with a declining flute-sounding arpeggio, it’s extinguished; over just as we began to submit completely to its spell. The fun is over.

Your Need is an impressively produced, immaculate-sounding, often beguiling record, whose slightness and concision are its only real drawbacks. If its flame burns all too briefly, perhaps it’s a blessing in disguise. The clarity and gratification of life’s worthwhile moments are over before they really begin too.